Brand Casters – Product Launch Expert with Tracy Hazzard from Plentiful Perspectives Podcast with Kevin A Dunlap

Looking to improve your life? Brush up on your personal growth techniques. You are in the right place. Welcome to Life's Little Lessons with your host, author of Designing youg Own Destiny, Kevin A. Dunlap.

Welcome, everybody. Thank you for tuning in again to Life's Little Lessons. And today is a lady I just met recently on a website known as LinkedIn. And she seems to be extremely professional. And I was asked her, chatting with her a little bit on LinkedIn. I just, I really wanted to have her on our show because I think not only myself, but most of the viewers out there or the people that are listening to this podcast can actually benefit from some of the services that she has. So her name is Tracy Hazard. She has two main companies, but I think she's actually running three different types of businesses here. One, one of her company is called Braincasters, which is helping you build your personal brand as well as, I believe, launching some of your other products and things like that. And her other company is called Haz Design. Just like our last name, Hazard is has designs. She's been actually a product launch expert for over 26 years, and she's also even a columnist for the online portion of the magazine called Inc. So today I have Tracy Hazard. Tracy, welcome to the show today.

Thanks so much for having me, Kevin. I'm so excited to be here.

So thank you. Thank you. And I'm excited to have you here as well. And during a little bit of our little pre interview, as we were getting all the things set up, come to find out, she actually has three different podcasts that she does on her own. Could you tell me a little bit about your three different podcasts that you do?

Sure. My first one just reached 500 episodes recently and it's called WTFF and that stands for what the future use Filament fabrication, which is the really geeky term for 3D printing.

And so if you don't know anything about 3D printing and you want to learn about it, that's the place. If you already do know what 3D printing is, but you want to learn more about how to design for it, that's the place. And I love it. I didn't think I could talk about it for 500 episodes, but evidently I can. And it does relate to my product design businesses. We've been using 3D printing for decades, so it's not, you know, it's not really something new to us, but it is new to most people out there. And then a spinoff one we've done is called Product Launch Hazards with twosies. Hazards, like my last name. And that is actually a members only podcast, so you can't access it live. It's really for my clients and it's kind of like having client calls all the time.

So it's this way. But we just. Yeah, it's a private podcast and so we provide that as an ongoing service to our clients when they're not working with us or when they're not. Right. Ready to work with us yet. And so we do that and then. And that one's relatively new. And then the other one that we have is called Feed, you'd brand and that is for brandcasters. And it's really like advanced techniques for content marketing. So lots of ninja tactics that we use to promote our podcasts or monetize things because I'm an online columnist. Lots of tips about how to write better blogs or headlines. And then we interview lots of different people who are podcasting or who are blogging or putting content out in a really unusual way and really getting stuff that works. Because I'm tired of the stuff that just, just makes you want to, you know, just makes you want to collapse with so much to do. Like I want the efficient stuff.

So you're writing an article in Ink magazine and you're interviewing and you're doing three different podcasts. Just how much, how often are you coming out with new material? How often is your shows?

So yeah, so we do at least eight shows per podcast. So that's 32 shows a week. A month. And then, and then. Yeah, and plus the articles. So yeah, another. Another six. So we at least do you know, I typically will write a few guest articles, so about 40 pieces of content every single month. Wow, I'm impressed. There's always an interview and there's always a written post that goes with every single thing we do, plus lots of sports spin offs and stuff. But I have a team. That's how you can do it, right? Can't do it alone. But I also do it really efficiently. So if I'm going to do an interview, I'm going to do a podcast recording and an article. So I do both at the same time. So it's really efficient.

Okay. And for those, this is what I'm doing. I don't know if this is the best way to be doing it, but so I'm going to ask you this. And also for people that are out there, that might be bloggers or podcasters as well that are listening, are you posting these on your personal websites and things like that for SEO and things.

Good question. That's a really good question. Yes. The number one thing we want to do nowadays is stop giving away our equity to Facebook and LinkedIn and all of these other places. They're great, useful places to push, promote, but they are not great places to build equity for you. So you must always drive people back to your website, even from the podcast. I don't tell them to go subscribe to itunes. I tell them to come to the website. And so you want to drive everyone back to your website and you want to make sure you have the highest Google power you can have there. And I personally, on our podcast, sometimes we beat out major publications on Google because we pushed so much content all the time that's so relevant. We can beat out certain pieces of information. So I can beat my ink column.

Sometimes because that's exactly why I do my show, because I'll write up the description, just like with us. I'll write a description based upon our interview as well, and that will go onto the video version of the podcast. And then the audio version on the podcast is two different things on my website. And what that's going to do for those of you that are listening or viewing is because you're using keyword rich content. And that's where, when people start Googling you, you have all of this stuff.

Out there and you don't have to try it. You don't have to know anything about SEO tactics or tricks or anything like that, because it's naturally coming out of your mouth, right? You're speaking to an expert who's in a particular area. So now that expertise is going to be associated with you and your. And so you don't have to work that hard at trying, you know, those little gray tactics, gray hat tactics of trying to, like, cram SEO words in there. You don't have to do that. The only thing that you really have to do is make sure that you transcribe the full amount. So. Because if you don't, then you're wasting the opportunity to have 6 to 10,000 words associated with your brand on the website. And you know you want to do it smartly. We advise and we rewrite our own leading paragraphs for each one so it doesn't read like Kevin said, Tracy said, like, it doesn't read like that, right? You don't want it to. You want to read like a post, right? So we take extra time and we triple transcribe just to make that happen. But it's worth it, really worth it, because the Google Power happens within weeks, not months.

Okay, good to know. Because I have heard about doing a full transcription, but I've never heard about it actually putting a full transcription onto like a blog.

Oh, yeah. So this is part of our brand. This is why we started our brand casting business. Because so many people were saying, what are you doing? Your site's outranking ours. Like it's killing it. What are you doing? I was like, well, we're simply doing this. And they said, would you do that for me? And so over a year ago, we started doing it for select people and we started doing it for a company that has 800 revenue generating websites that were all based on SEO tactics and written blog posts only. And we were doing a podcast and our show was at least 20 to 30% outranking all of their other other websites at the same stage. And so they were like, what are you doing? Well, it's the spoken word. And then how we were blogging from that because I didn't want to do more work. Right. I didn't want to write a blog on top of it all. That's too much work.

Yes.

And I'm a writer and I didn't want to do that.

Well, then it does become difficult to come coming up with new content all the time. And I'm surprised you're able to do over 500 episodes on WTFF show.

Well, you know, I mean, we do interviews just like you do, so it always keeps the content fresh. We do topics all the time, but that's because we are experts in it. So people are looking to what we think about something. So there's always something new going on in the industry to talk about. There's always, you know, because we're using it in our daily business, there's also things that we discover about it. Oh, an easier way to do this or a new material no one's ever tried before. So there's always an aha. And there's trade shows that inspire you, ces, you know, little mini trade shows you might go to. All of those types of things show up and, you know, they give you new, new content, new exciting ideas and new things to talk about.

So I guess that's. That would be true. Because if you're in a technology platform, new technology is always coming up or faster computers or whatever it is. That's always coming up as well.

Yeah, I mean, we try to stay really, how do I put it? Timeless in the way that we talk about things so that it's relevant to whoever might be Learning in their process of learning about 3D printing. Right. So they can co along the way with us so that they will binge listen or binge watch in your case. Right? You want them to do that so that they're following a journey. If that's the case for them, I don't want them to feel something that was like, just pulled out of like, you know, politics or socioeconomic, something that happened. Unless it's really necessary to talk because it created such a massive shift in the marketplace and outdates it. Something else you want to. You would want to point that out, but otherwise we try to stay away from that and only talk about things that really make it relevant to them and moving forward.

And I fully agree with you because that's when I was writing, doing this show, I wanted to make sure that it was something that it was seamless or was timeless. Because if you're listening to the recording and it's two weeks later after it was posted versus it was six months later, maybe it was two and a half years later, it's still relevant for that time frame. So I fully agree.

And, you know, here's where your website's so important, because when you reach 500 episodes, Apple or iTunes, the library is only catalog 300 episodes. So where are your other 200 gonna be? Like, this is a new problem. So we have all those volumes on our website. They can read the blogs at any time. They can listen to those podcasts over the website, and you don't have to worry about whether or not they're in the player or not.

Right. And the thing is, if they're on your website, they're staying on the website. Google recognizes those are staying on your website. And you're gonna rank just based upon that as well. That's a nice little. I didn't even think about that. That's a nice little.

Right? And it doesn't matter where people are listening to it. Your podcast statistics are drawing from wherever it's served from. So it doesn't matter where they're listening from. They could be listening on the website, on Stitcher, on itunes, you know, somebody else's directory. I haven't. I'm in directories all over the world that I didn't even know I was in, like, directories that are, you know, Brazil only or something like that. And you didn't even know it. And it doesn't matter, because it's all that matters is what that source file and how it's being accessed.

Now, let me ask you this, because this wasn't something I was going to ask. But let me ask you this. For anybody that's starting out with a business, obviously video and this podcast is mainly audio, but video is also very important. How important? Because I've been hearing recently that to help promote yourself, do a lot of stuff like on Facebook Live or something live, just start getting your face out there, getting your brand, your face as part of your brand out there. Now is that, do you recommend this as a branding expert or maybe not.

Or not first. So yeah, I mean it's, don't get me wrong, video is great because look, you can see the expression of my face. You can hear the passion. You can, you know, you really get that coming across. It comes across an audio as well. But some people really like that video. But there's a lot of video competition. I mean YouTube is got millions and millions of videos accessed every day to be found there. You have to spend a lot of money, be highly ranked. You have to work hard at marketing that. And that's not my core business. Like I want to operate in my core business. I want something that I do in marketing to be just an easy way to be passed on or an easy way for whoever wants to consume me. So we do like to use multiple media methods. So that's why there's written, that's why there are some videos. But we tend to use videos like companions, an occasional Facebook Live when it makes sense.

Sometimes we'll do a short video that shows how we used a machine, a demo when it makes sense to use it, and then we embed it in the blog post. So if it's going to be something, we want them to access it from the blog post. So we never even worry about how we rank on YouTube or how we rank on Facebook. We don't really worry about that. But if you don't have in Facebook, if you don't have a big followership, so if you don't have a lot of fans and a lot of fans that are active and matter, then doing video is not going to help you get more fans. It doesn't do enough of that. But what video can do is let's say you had a thousand fans. Okay, that's really low, of course, but really only about 130 of them will see any post that you make at any given time.

Even if they have it see first on their Facebook page.

They have to select that. It's getting harder and harder for them to see you. So at most you'll probably get 130 people if you pay for ads, you might get two to three times that. So that's a technique you can do. You can pay even really tiny, like a dollar a day and still get two to three times the amount of people watching you. They give a boost to people who spend money. And then if you do a Facebook Live, you might get that boost also. But again, it's the same thousand people seeing you again and again and again. Does it really matter if they aren't activating? So if you are getting a response back, if you're getting lots of comments, if your Facebook Live is really helping people getting shared, then keep doing it, because there's obviously a good reason for it. But if it's just sitting there, maybe a handful of likes, that it's not working for you, so do something else. And so that's where we go into. We do it maybe once or twice a month just as a booster, just to remind people of our thousand fans or however many we have that we're here and make sure that a larger audience sees us out of that thousand. But we don't really use it as a massive marketing technique. Now you're spending money on Facebook. Videos are a great way to do it. If you're spending ad dollars, using video is a higher boost.

Okay. And also, I've been noticing, and I've heard this through a couple of sources, that if you are going to be putting video on Facebook, that you should have the caption turned on. So is that something you've noticed or you do or you don't do, or.

You know, I think I. I think sometimes it helps because people are watching and they turn the sound off because they're in an environment in which they don't want to. But I think for the most part, people who watch videos, you know, are watching it for the visual. And so if you don't have a visually compelling video, it's just talking heads, that's probably the best thing you can do is turn the captions on or it won't capture their attention. And so you know that it just depends on what it is. And that's why we prefer the sort of, like the visual videos, the ones that are, like, showing, demoing something, they're really short. They get them excited. You want to find out more, we'll go to this blog post or go to this podcast, you know, head somewhere else. And so that's. We call them appetizers, right?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Who doesn't love a little appetizer?

That's true. And you were talking. We were Talking about just at the very beginning that you. You say that you're a product launch expert. You've been doing that for 26 years now. We were just in, mainly talking about shooting video and podcasts. But let's talk about your business as a product launch expert. And why did you get into that business and why do you do. Why do you do that?

Yeah. So, I mean, I've been doing this for decades. I have a design degree and I worked for big brands like Martha Stewart Living and Target and Walmart and Costco. And I work. You probably bought products that I design and you just don't even know it.

You know? Yeah. So there you go. And so it's kind of like being a ghostwriter. Right. People don't know who you are, and so. And people sometimes are reluctant to admit they used you, so you don't get the good referrals. Or if they. If they do, they did use you and they loved you. They don't want to share you because they want you to be available for their next project exclusively. Right. They don't want the competitors to use you. So it got to be this really difficult business to market. And so. And so while it was great, we kind of capped at a size, and I think this happens to a lot of consulting companies and a lot of firms. So we either had to go and go a massive firm like that was bigger with a bunch of junior designers and really go out there and market the firm as a whole, or we had to adopt a totally different method. And my partner's my husband, and he and I both said, you know, this isn't the lifestyle we want. We don't want a massive amount of junior designers working for us. We want to have this basic where we can have a business where we can interact with clients, but we can be picky. We can choose between the ones we want. So we went out to diversify our business about. I'd say about five years ago and do different things. And that's why we started a podcast and why we built 3D printing in as a part of our business. And so why I speak all the time on stages everywhere to talk about launching to Amazon sellers now. So that's an expanded part of our business and why I have a membership community. Like all of those things came out of an idea that I wanted to be able to still do exactly what I do. Great. And live in that excitement of working directly with a client and not losing touch for that. But I wanted to build a bigger, more sustainable business.

Now, you are launching products that are mainly either something that's tangible or maybe like a new business program or something like that. Is that what you mainly work with?

Yeah, we usually work with things that go into mass market retail, e commerce. So they would be sold on Amazon.

Jet.Com, walmart.com, now. Yeah, anything like that. We haven't done a ton on ebay, but it doesn't matter. Our products are sold on ebay. We don't do the selling part, we do the product development, the design part. Finding products in Asia and making them special and unique, Our gift is actually bringing them competitive advantages. So a lot of times that's patenting. A lot of times it's not. It's just being better and being more appealing to the marketplace.

Okay.

And that translates into no matter what, you want to launch service or product or whatever, or podcast. Right. You have to have a lot of competitive intelligence. You have to bring a lot of, I call it me only. A lot of special that only someone could get from me. And when you think about it like that, that's service to your audience, but it's something unique and tangible. At the end of the day, you're the only place for that. When that happens, you're in golden competitive territory.

Now, do you help people build their product or service?

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. We prefer people don't come to us with a product already pre done because we can't do much for them at that point. We use. If someone has a product line, we'll expand their programs and their lines. That's what we do for the big brands like Martha Stewart.

Okay. Do you work with people that are just starting out, new business owners, new.

Entrepreneurs all the time? Yeah, we. We only take projects that are fun and challenging and we can add something to. So there's lots of stuff out there that, you know, people are buying and reselling on Amazon. That's not something we get involved in. There's lots of people out there who can help them just find something. But if you want something special, you want to make it unique, you want to make it sell better, you want to sell it for, you know, 25, 30% more margin, then we're the people to help come make that happen.

Okay. Because a lot of the people that I've interviewed out of so far, I would say probably maybe 20% of them are like coaches of some sort sort either passion coaches, business coaches, business consultants, relationship coach is another gentleman. That's going to be launched in a couple of days here.

Would you be able to help them.

With their businesses, the brandcasters business. So like our product side? Not the product side, but the brand and podcast side of the business. Absolutely. We help people like that all the time, and sometimes it translates into coaching about what's unique about their business and a strategy and tactics for making that better. But I would say we're kind of the how to people. Like, you want to know how to do something, you want to get it done fast. You don't want to do it yourself. That's really where our area of expertise is. We're the people. Get stuff launched, get it done, get it done quickly, and, you know, and do it with, I would say, probably a lot more detail, exacting detail, than you would do if you had to learn it all yourself.

Okay. And, I mean, I know for the last three years, for myself, I've been developing my own programs and things like that, but that's going off, going off to other people's classes and things like that and just slowly going through it. Obviously, you've been through this for going on three decades here that you've been doing this. So you've seen the.

Good, the bad, and the ugly. You've seen it all.

I've seen some really ugly. And what I see is a lot of time wasted. Like, it's, you know, it's a time and money wasted at the beginning of things. So this is really where it happens. Like, if you're thinking about a product, like my favorite example that I've written about in my column and I use in my. In presentations all the time, is a. Is a woman who developed a striped shirt. Because it's a really simple idea. You can get this in your head. She thought, why should you go to, you know, Texas Rangers or a Boston Red Sox game and wear their logo? Why not wear the teen colors in a striped shirt? Classier. This is her idea. So she tells a bunch of friends, and they go, oh, that sounds really cool. That sounds really fun. And she goes down this road, and she's a PR and marketing expert, so she has an area of expertise. So she spends all this time and money building a beautiful website and a PR plan for launching it. And she meets someone who can make the product in. I think it's India. Make the product in India for her. And he gives her all the pricing, and she says, okay, I can do this. And she buys 10,000 shirts in various colors. She has a garage full of them. And so five years later, she spent $150,000 between the website and the product and launching five years later, she throws what I thought was the most brilliant marketing campaign that caught my eye. She threw a Kickstarter campaign to stop her crazy business because it wasn't working. And she should have found that out with five pieces, right? Shown them around, gotten people who aren't her friends to tell her what they really think. Would they really buy this, Throw some up on Amazon and see if they sell in a place where if it's good, it will sell. Right. And spent maybe $5,000. And that would have been on the high side to me. And if she had done that, she would have found out within months that that is not a viable business. She should do something else.

Well, that's the whole thing is you do need a test market, and that's.

Got to test it. And people don't. They get in this head of like. And it happens all the time with coaches because they get a couple of great clients who say they're wonderful and they think they've got something here, but it doesn't translate into getting the word out to a broader audience, a higher conversion rate. Right? More people joining your programs. And how do you get that. That sort of momentum going? You've got to get beyond the group of people who know you and really find out what people think. Is it priced right? Is it. Am I presenting it right? Am I in the right place to even meet the right people? And that requires lots of testing and refining and pivoting, retesting again and getting that part right rather than worrying about every single detail. What I see happen is that you basically say, oh, my program must be broken. Let me revise my program again. And so they redo their course. And they redo their course. And they redo their course. And has nothing to do with the course. It has the fact that they're not connecting to the marketplace. The people who really need them still, they aren't accessing them. And so that's the most important. If you can access them, you can build anything to sell to them later. That's easier.

Okay. And there's a. There's a lady that. I took her class a couple of years ago, and she has this phrase, and I think it was her father that told her that she goes, a. Build a plane while you're flying it. So just.

And yeah, that's not totally my favorite.

I believe in a plan. Okay? Hope is not a plan. It's not a strategy. That is my mantra here. You should have a plan because you have nothing to measure against it.

Okay?

Like, okay, If I'm building this plane on the way down and I hit 10,000ft and I don't have wings yet, should I, you know, should I parachute out? Like, you know, when is the time? If you have nothing to comp against, no comparison, none of those things along the way, you have no metrics, you have no milestones, you don't know if you're getting the right answers and you don't know whether you should shift. And so that's really a critical part of what happens is pivoting, shifting. It's not a gigantic turnaround. It might be a little degree. And that degree difference is going to make a huge degree, a huge amount of money later or a huge amount of time lost later. So you have to really be having a clear plan about what you're doing along the way.

Okay, thank you for sharing that. Because when you were saying that, it reminded me of another.

I don't think they should tool for everything and build the whole plane. Don't get me wrong. Right. That's exactly expensive. Right. You don't know if it's gonna fly, but you gotta have a plan along the way of how to do that or what, how to stop when it's going badly.

Okay. And that's, that is part of why I think this was when she said that was. That's why you build it, because you're building it as you've seen what the market is doing. That's what I think is what she meant by that.

Yeah.

Okay. And so, so you've been doing the version for 26 years and you talked about you have a. Your new company called Has Designs.

No, Has Designs, my old company. So I've had that the longest. Yeah. And you know, that's. It simply is just that it's a consulting firm for product development and our specialty is launching. So, you know, getting stuff ready to launch and doing it in the right order. So we actually, we have a clear process we use that keeps and reserves budget for the massive amount of marketing you have to spend later for promotion. Promotion costs. It's hard to get your products found on a shelf. I mean, think of how noisy the online world is and think of how busy the shelves at Target are. These are expensive propositions. So you can't afford to make mistakes. And yet it happens all the time. 7 out of 10 consumer products fail in the marketplace. 14 out of 15 products on HSN and QVC failure.

Yes, they fail miserably. And so when you look at those statistics that you know and you know and I've even heard recently someone say 1 in 15,000 ideas are any good.

So the odds are really stacked against you that you're going to spend a ton of money and get it wrong. And that to me is a crime. So we have the flipped odds. So we have an 86% commercialization rate because we reject projects before $5,000 is spent. We stop a project and we shift it and we make it right and we find the right market or we fix the product to meet the market and we do all of those things early on to make it right. Before we hit into the expensive things. You have to buy like a full utility and international patent. Before you would buy tooling and all that inventory, like those striped shirts in the garage, before you would make all those decisions, before you had a higher likelihood for knowing you were going to be successful and for risk reduction along the way because you've gotten some answers.

Okay, sounds like you provide a very valuable service there.

Well, it works for everyone. So the number one thing is to prove it right. You can say you have a great product idea, you can say you provide a great service, but can you prove it? Have you really gone out there and tried it? And it's not that hard. So we get people who say, oh, I've just invented the best baby product ever. Well, moms are really picky, especially moms of newborns and toddlers. They care about what goes in their kids mouth or around them. Did you actually ask them? Did you go to a meetup of mothers of preschoolers, mops, groups? They won't charge you anything. You can show up there and buy them, you know, natural, healthy desserts, healthy snacks for their kids and maybe some coffee. They could probably use some coffee. And just ask them what they really think. They'll tell you. Would they spend money on it. So there's lots of ways to get good results. And you can do the same thing as a coach, a service provider. You can go there, go find the right kind of people and ask them, do you really need my services? And if I provided it in this way, would you use me?

Okay, sorry, I'm taking notes.

So that's good. So, but that there's no, not proving it, just taking this as. And I call them yes men and no women. Yes men say, hey, yes, you're great, I love you. No men, no women. They all say, oh, gosh, Kevin, we love you and we don't want you to risk anything and we don't want you to fail. So we're going to tell you don't do it. And that's just as bad, them telling you not to do it because they love you, because they're afraid of the risk for you. That derails you as well. So you don't want people saying, you're wonderful. And you don't want people saying, this is terrible and it's a great idea. Right. You need to have objective review of that from somebody who would actually use it and buy it.

Okay. Kind of just came to. Words that came. Just came to my mind were constructive criticism.

Yes. And you gotta listen to it. A lot of people don't want to hear it.

Yes. Because if it's not in alignment with how they're thinking, then yes, I can either take that. Well, they take it into a negative way. But I used to do a lot of stuff on stage and in film and, you know, during the rehearsals, the. The director will come, or the. Yeah, the director will come up there, says, okay, Bob, you did this wrong. Or Tracy, you should do this better. You may take it personally. Like, no, he's just trying to make you be better at what you're doing.

Right. And that's the thing is it's like, look, if you think they're wrong, like my. I love. You know, everyone loves the story of someone who went, you know, and. And went to 10,000 different people and they said no. Right. And then still made a success of it. And, you know, I think of the story of Sarah Blakely and Spanx, Right. She got turned away by so many VCs, it was ridiculous. And look at. Phenomenally successful she is. And, you know, so, yeah, a lot of times you're out there and they just don't get it. And you really get it. But all along the way, what she did know was that her core audience wanted it. They were begging her. She couldn't make enough in a garage to keep up with the demand of people who are actually buying it. So the VCs didn't get it, but her core market did. And so that's what you have to underlie is like, if you're gonna do. If you're gonna defy all of those. People keep telling you, no, this isn't any good. You better really know you're right, and you better have that underlying proof that you're right along the way.

Well, that's part of that one in 15,000. I mean, the movie that came to my mind that I think was Renee Zellowegger was a movie called Joy, the one that she. She created this special mop Suffering, you mop.

That movie gives me anxiety. Like, it gives me absolute anxiety. I watched it once and I was like, I can never watch this again. It was so horrible because I watch all those things that happen to entrepreneurs and inventors that is so nasty about the industry in the marketplace. They all happen to her. And I've had it happen to me. I had a patent stole, you know, I had a patent infringed upon. So, like, I know those anxiety that, that like, not going to be able to pay my people, I'm going to have to let everybody go. I'm failing my family, I'm going to lose my house. Like, I mean, these happen. I hear these stories all the time. But it's the rare individual like that who really gets to make it.

Yes, there is something to say about persistence, but there's also something to say about just go ahead and stop doing what you're doing. Yeah.

You know, see, this is what I wanted. I want to flip the odds. That's what my goal is of doing this is. This is what my always. My goal about talking about how to do this better is that there is a better method for doing this. Right. I've done 250 products in the last eight years alone. And they've, like I said, 90%, almost 90% success rate. So that means 90% of them made money. And in my case, making money means at minimum, they do about a million dollars a year at retail because that's the lowest selling Amazon product I would make. And some of them do $20 million a year. Just a single SKU. So you're talking about a lot of value that gets added into the marketplace and for those brands and for those companies. So I have a high level responsibility for being right and having met, you know, so I can't rely on my gut that says, oh, yeah, I think I'm right. I got to have some proof in the process. Right? Because I got, I gotta. I've got somebody else's family is gonna rely on my ability to be successful for them. That's a lot of burden. And I can't be wrong. I can't pick the wrong color. I mean, can you imagine that? That's like, that's a huge decision we make every single day is, are we making this in the right color? I have to have some data, I have to have some research, I have to have some backup because otherwise it's too risky for me to take on their behalf. I can't treat that callously.

You also have, like, you're Saying your success rate, you just want to just take on anybody when you say, you know what, last week I was dealing with somebody just like you.

Well, and that's why I have litmus tests when I take people, when I take calls from people and they don't allow of them, don't pass it, they're not ready for me yet. And that's okay. They're just not ready to listen. What I don't want to have happen though is that they get caught in that, in that trap of spending 10, $20,000 with an event help group or a, you know, just patenting and not getting anywhere with them. And so that was part of why we started our membership group which we're going to expand over the next year because we really wanted to give a safer place for people to get information about what does work and what's. What are maybe some of the right ways to do things and some of the right resources to use. So even if I can't take them on, there is a place that, that can help them.

Okay, well I'm going to shift gears a little bit and we're going to talk about more about you and how, you know, how the person that's listening on the show, the entrepreneur or the student soon to be want to be entrepreneur could also benefit. So with that I'd like to talk about your successes, your challenges, your fears and things like that. So when you, let's just go, I guess just dive in. When you were first starting, I guess even 26 years ago, what were some of your first early successes that showed you that you could do what you did?

You know, I didn't start out as an entrepreneur. I actually was a very reluctant entrepreneur. I wanted to be within a company. I mean, I went straight out of college and went to work for a big textile manufacturing company and then eventually worked for Herman Miller, the inventor and maker of the Aeron chair. I'm sure you're probably seen that iconic mesh chair that's in almost every tech company and it's 20 years old. So it's actually 23 years old or something like that right now. And so I was lucky to work early in these kind of very design driven companies with great process and great research. And I saw that sort of expansive look at how products get made and how things get launched. And so I had a bigger, broader view of it. But I also saw that it really paid off to be an intrapreneur that if you had a lot of gumption and you had a lot of leadership and you had a lot of ideas that you could be heard if you framed it right. And that goes to pitching, right? If you could pitch it right internally, you could get lots of things done. And so there I was. I mean, I was. I graduated from college and I wasn't even. I was just 21. I couldn't even rent a car. And so, like, I. They would send me up to go meet with automotive manufacturers and discuss what colors and what materials should be in your. In your. In your Chevy truck. Like, I look like a truck driver right at that time. And I would have to go present to them what would be the car, the design that they should have 10 years in the future, because that's how long it would take before that car would be in the marketplace or that truck. And so, I mean, I had to have all sorts of confidence and so that. But just being empowered like that by an organization to go out there and speak my mind and have to learn how to pitch again and again and again. That was the biggest lesson I could have ever gotten. That taught me, just taught me the basis for everything. How to be concise, how to get your point across, how to really do that and be convincing, and how to have some data. So you can't talk about what I like, what I feel. You have to talk about what will work.

So you had to back it up, basically.

You did, yeah. And I learned that early on. And when you. And I think that's become a basis for success for me.

Okay, so let's talk about successes then. What kind of successes are you achieving right now?

You know, it's never enough, I have to say. Like, I, you know, I'm probably harder on myself than anyone else. And so, like, I mean, we've had a. Because we have two businesses at once. So it was a heavy investment year. So it felt like constant, like reinvesting back in the business and not personally rewarding enough this year. And I think that happens for everyone. It's. It's a reinvention year. And so everyone goes through waves like that. But I, you know, for us, we hit a mile. We had a couple of milestones of just.

Awesome sales volume on some of the products we've been selling. When you get a product that goes into mass market retail, like in Costco in this particular case, and it gets in year after year after year. It's very rare. So we have a platinum record seller of an office chair that's available at Costco for $99 every single day. You can buy it there, and it's in its sixth year of being there. And that's just a huge. And so we look at the numbers of that. That's probably like the best sell out of any competitive industry we've worked in. So like all different product categories, that's the most successful product that we've ever found. And so we're like, oh, we should celebrate. But the reality is it was like, yeah, but you know, I designed that five years ago and I'm onto the new thing. So you have a little hard time celebrating those successes enough and really realizing, wow, that really has come a long way. You have to be conscious of that and sit back and make yourself aware of that, especially when you're in a relaunch. And so for us, that's what it is. Every month we're launching somebody's product, we're launching something new. It's always in startup mode. So it's always high intensity and it feels anxiety driven for a lot of our clients. And so we're always in kind of calm down mode. No, we've got this. You're gonna be okay. So it feels like a lot of that. And that makes it harder to really be like, yay, we did it. So the success is feel a little like qualified, which is terrible. And so my, my goal in the next year is to shift that because we should be really hitting a lot of higher milestones and, and we won't be working in that part of a business. I built more team, so.

Okay. And without. With successes. Let's talk about some of your early on things that went on as well. Because when you have a success, it usually is followed after, after a big fear. So.

Oh yeah. You know, for a lot I would say, like, if, if, you know, for me, I think we operate right on the edge of fear all the time. It's like, it's like, you know, it is the case because I'm really conscious of the fact that for a lot of this, and that's why I like to balance out my work with corporations and with startups, because we don't want to be. If we were all in the startup world, I think my anxiety level would be way too high. Because everybody's livelihood, their family, the families of the new people, they're hiring, like, that's a lot. That's like having more businesses on your back. And so for me, I take it very personally. And so I don't want to have all of my, I don't want to have everything that I do be that way. Otherwise it would just be too intense. And I have my own family, right. And this year my daughter joined my business and she's running one. She's CEO of my brandcasters business and she's doing a phenomenal job. And I feel so actually relieved by that. I think that's my biggest success this year was letting her take over that. But it was a big fear point for me because it was like, wow, I have to give this, you know, 23 year old kid out of college who is my daughter, who I adore and what if she gets pissed every time I tell her that's not the way I would do it, you know, what if I. Right. And so I thought my fear was that it was ruin our relationship. Instead it has just made it better. So yeah, you know, it has to go through that fear stage and it's for everybody but you know, can you have a qualified fear? So I always feel a little better if I can sit back and say, okay, that's fear, like banging at me. Is that fear I should listen to? Because I'm really doing something so risky and I have, you know, because I'm conscious of that is am I going to risk my family, am I going to risk my home? Am I going to risk my clients, livelihood, family and home? And if it's any of those things, I look at the numbers, I got to take it back, look at the numbers and say, is this the right thing? Am I recommending the wrong thing and am I listening to the wrong thing? And so that's something that, you know, you have to qualify it for yourself. And if you're conscious of it, that it's fear driven, then at least you're conscious of the fact that maybe you're reacting and you're not, you're not sitting back and making a conscious decision to do something.

So yes, there's a, because part of, part of my book, Designing your own Destiny, there's a difference between responding and reacting. Responding is a conscious decision while reacting is just an, is an emotional decision. So it's, that's good. And what would you say to anybody that's out there that's coming up with big fears? Like, I'm sure you deal with a lot of startup entrepreneurs, so I'm sure you see a lot of the same thing over and over again. What would you suggest to those people that are just getting started to get past that? Most likely that fear is, is it going to sell? Am I going to lose everything or am I even good enough? I mean, I'm sure you see Those kinds of fears.

Yeah. You know, that the. Am I good enough? Is a big. Is a harder question to deal with. Like, I can deal with all day long. Is my product good enough? Is my idea good enough? Like, I can deal with that because there's data you can throw at that. But am I good enough? Am I big enough? Is really a question I ask myself all the time. Am I being big enough for what I need to be for my business? And then it's a question, and there's always a fear attached to it of, like, you know, that keeps us playing small. And, you know, it's. It's. That is one of the things I work on all the time. I have a life coach I work with. I adore her. And. And I know when it's time to talk to her again, because I know when I start restraining myself, then I am. I am letting fear drive. And that's really just. It's my. But I couldn't have said that five years ago. I was not in a place where I could have said that. I was in a place at which, you know, I was. I was in save mode. I was saving my family by building this business. I was, you know, protecting them. I was closing us off. I was, you know, doing mama bear kind of things. And so, you know, that was. Was what I had to do at the time. But when I said, okay, enough is enough. I can't operate like this. This is not who I am. This is not healthy. This is not actually good for our family. Let's change things up. You got to expand yourself. And when you realize that you need that, you'll keep seeking it. And you. I find that people who. Who recognize that it's. The ones who have not done the analysis work have not sat back and really realized that they come from a place of fear, that they have a lot more work to do.

Okay. And with fears also comes challenges. Even the word failures. I don't really like using the word failure. Some people resonate with the word. And I almost always say in almost every one of my shows, there is no such thing as failure.

NFP certified. So one of the things they say, there's no such thing as fair. It's only feedback. So a failure is just your perception of a situation. Because some people's failure could be somebody else's launching pad.

That's right. So I actually love failure. And because failure is the best feedback, that's something I can fix. Right. I'm a designer. I can fix that. So, like. But when you don't get a response that's worse to me. Like zero response. That kills me. When you have no feedback, when you have no information, I can't do anything with that. That's the worst. That's the worst that could happen in my business. But failures, I'm very accustomed to it. And it's something that I'm working really hard to make sure that my daughters are accustomed to it too. Because I think this is really. It's one of the critical factors that holds girls back from science, technology, engineering, art, and math a lot as well. And so we look at that from our 3D printing world. We look at pushing that. And so I love 3D printing for that because you've got, you print up a product and it looks terrible. You scrape it off the plate and you start again. You make a modification and you start again. And so having something that's so physically representative of failure and making them used to it early on is a great way to get accustomed to that. And that's really where I want is like everyone to feel very accustomed to this idea of failure. And I went to art school. When you go to art school, you do a project and they have a critique and it's harsh. They're not nice to you. That's not their job. Their job is to make you better the next time so you will improve in your process. And they only have four years. You go to a four year school to get you through that process. And so having that ability to constantly accept criticism and then take that in and turn it back into something else and not take it personally and treat it like failure, that's a huge skill. And I want to get that across to the people that I work with. I want to get that across to my daughters and really get everyone accustomed to that idea that it. Failure just is. That's just a word.

Okay, I'm glad you said. Because I was about to say that you cannot take it personally because that was going through my mind. I was waiting for you to finish your statement.

Yeah, you can't take it personally because I mean, if I did it like, I mean, I mean every. I mean the whole design process is about failure. That's what you design testing is, right? Design of experiment. It invites failure because if you find the failure point, then you know how to dial it back and make it successful. So it's part of the process. You have to embrace it, actually.

Okay. And actually because I feel your biggest lessons come from your setbacks come from those things. Because if everything was always went Right. Every time around then you never growing, you're never learning, you never, you're never pushing yourself.

So I read a book, this is one of my favorite books that I've read in the last five years, Shane Snow's Smart Cuts. And he talks about that, the fact that they did a study of like surgeons in hospitals and right. And they would have a, you know, something went wrong in operation and they would have this sort of post op.

Discussion and presentation of what went wrong. And so they typically a post mortem literally. Right. Because that's usually a fatal outcome. And so they would have this discussion and what they found was, is that the surgeons who were presenting what went wrong almost never got it right. They almost never saw what was really wrong. But in observing other people's failures, those doctors actually improved. They didn't make the same mistakes. And so we have a hard time looking at our own failures and analyzing them and learning from them. So we have to also go out there and learn from other people's failures. That's where we can learn the most. He also talks in his book in this chapter about startups in Silicon Valley and that they're all analyzing what went wrong. And so, and they were always like, oh, the market shifted or it wasn't what we expected or the VCs pulled out and we lost our funding and all of these things. But all the other startups in the group were watching them go and those guys didn't have this, they were missing that. And so when you're not self analytical about it too, so get out there and learn from other people failures.

And that's kind of the purpose of this show because I want you to be able to, especially the second half. I want people to learn from the successes and the failures that you guys went through so that they would say, you know what, it's okay that I'm going through this similar situation, it's okay that I may be hiring my daughter to be my chief operations officer. It's okay that so okay, fantastic. And.

We'Re coming close to the end. So one of the things I always like to ask is what are some lessons that you've learned or some upbeat moments that you've learned or even tidbits that you would like to be shared with, say somebody that's listening, that's just starting up their own businesses or starting a new product line even?

Yeah, such a good question. You know, I mean.

For me this is how I treat ideas, product ideas, my personal ideas could be service ideas, new things we want to Build in our business. I treat them like we're playing cards. I've got a hand I'm playing right now, and there's certain things that I can accomplish this year that would make this the perfect hand. And so I'm going to draw cards, and if it fits my hand, I'm going to keep it. And to my office, somebody goes, but it's an ace. It's such a good card. But there's no place for it in your hand today, so you gotta discard it. And so I always treat that as a discard pile. This is not a trash. We're not shredding our ideas. They're not permanently gone. That deck's gonna get shuffled and it's gonna come back up, and maybe the next hand that I have or my hand will have shifted and it will be right the next time around. So I like to treat those ideas of they're gonna come back again. They're not gone. But I don't have to ruminate over them. I don't have to like, oh, I missed my opportunity. No, it just wasn't right, right at that moment. And I try to treat it with that kind of, like, level of, they're not my babies. I have three babies. I know the difference. So you know, they're not my babies. And so if you can treat that kind of ideas about your business and stop grasping onto all of them, because that's hard, because we can only do so much with the resources we have. We can do a lot more. We can be a lot more successful.

And be willing to let go.

You got to let go of some things. Right. And with let go, with the consciousness that it can come back to you, it will come back to you when it's right. I always have that mindset. I didn't let it go and it's over.

Well, there's a thing that I've heard quite a lot, and this actually pertains to sales, but this can also pertain to your. Your product as well. And just what they say is a no doesn't mean a no. It just means a not now.

Not now. That's right. Yeah.

It may not work in this market right now because we're to say we're in a. We're in an appreciating market. We're in a, you know, we're in an approving market. Your idea works great if it's in a declining market or know whatever it is that you're.

Yeah. If you've got a really small hand, a really big Hand, it doesn't matter. It's what resources you have at that moment. And it can work or it just doesn't work. And you really have to. Just because you got to make some decisions, you can't just agonize over them and stall and take your time and wait for them for everything to be right. It doesn't always work like that. It's like, what's right this moment so I can keep progressing. What's the best choice I can make today and make it. I'm not a. I mean, I'm analytical about what I do, but I don't agonize over those decisions because they're not typically fatal. There's always an opportunity to adjust.

And I like what you said there as well. And be able to make a decision to start moving forward. Don't just let fear paralyze you from ever even getting started. I mean, I'm gonna be asking for your. How they contact you here in a moment. So, I mean, if this is something, you know, that they say, you know, I've been toiling with this idea, say, for six months. Well, it's time to go out there and start testing it to see if there's a market for it. And you could be a perfect prime example, some of what that could help them in the long run.

So, yeah, it's, you know, it's. It's just these are a lot of things, that little lessons that we learn all the time, you know, that. That really become a daily part of what we do. And what I found is that, you know, people are always shocked, oh, my gosh, look at all you do. Look at all those podcasts you do. Look at all these blog posts. Look at all you do in a month. How do you do all of that? It's like, well, I just never stopped taking action. Right. I don't overthink it. If it's not working, I will. I would have stopped doing it long time ago. Right. So I don't have time for that. And so that's really where it's just constantly taking action. The road starts to. The path starts to form itself in front of you.

Okay. And as I guess is our final question, I'll be asking, what do you see yourself in the next 12 to 24 months? What kind of steps do you see is going to be happening in all of your businesses?

So it's really hard for a lot of people to see today because it sounds like I've got disparate businesses. And actually it does sound like three businesses. Right? Sounds like a 3D printing business and industry right there. And a business marketing and branding and content marketing and a business developing products. But actually the three are coming together to be a multi billion dollar business. And so that's what you're going to see from us, I think, within 24 months. And what it is is a business that is focused around providing digital content of product, of service, of brand, of content, of information, and providing all of that in a very different way than we've seen before. And it's a great way to test market and a great way to test out your ideas. And it's also a great way to not get encumbered, whether you're a massive retailer like Costco and Walmart and Target with inventory.

In any way, shape or form, or end up with 10,000 striped shirts in your garage. Right. No, you know, digital inventory is the future and that's really where we're moving towards overall.

And I agree with that as well, because I've got a couple of digital products and it's no cost to me. I mean, maybe where I'm hosting it may cost a monthly fee or they take a percentage or whatever it is. But yeah, I agree. Digital products are definitely the way of the future.

Yeah. And so imagine if we can do that with physical products. Okay, that's the future.

Okay. Well, Tracy, it's been a great pleasure having you on the show. If somebody out there in the audience wants to get ahold of you, what is the best way to get a hold of you? Have a website that you want to give or a business line?

Absolutely. And of course, actually the best way, if you're on social media to meet me is just like you did on LinkedIn. You can find me at Tracy Hazzard on LinkedIn. Hazzard with two z's. And you can also find me@hasdesign.com and that's really a jumping off point for all our podcasts and everything we do. So H A Z Z dash E S I G n dot com.

Okay, so that is hash A Z Z design. D as in dog E S I G n dot com. Well, Tracy, it's been a great pleasure having you on the show. I know I learned a lot and I may be going to your Has Designs website here and see about promoting some of the stuff that I'm doing. So I do want to say really appreciate you taking the time out of your schedule because I know you've got 30 plus things going on, basically one per day. And this is also. Well, I just want to say thank you. Thank you very much for being on the show.

You're very welcome. It's been a pleasure.

Any last words that you have with the audience?

Oh, just, you know, take action. Just start moving, start launching. It's so much fun to be actively testing out your ideas. So do it.

And I think it'll be probably one of the greatest treasures that a person go through is getting that first successful launch just now. I now they have a proven test record that they actually can do it. Now just rinse and repeat.

Prove that you can do it. That's right.

Okay. Okay, Tracy. Well, thank you for being on the show today. And I will let you know when it's going to be going live. And. And yeah, we'll just talk after the show then.

So everybody, that'd be wonderful.

So, Tracy, thank you, everybody in the audience. Have a very wonderful afternoon or evening or whatever time of day it is for you. And again, thank you, Tracy.

Thank you.

Bye bye.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Life's Little Lessons with your host, author of Designing youg Own Destiny, Kevin A. Dunlap. For more great content and to stay up to date, visit kevinadunlap.com facebook.com kevanadunlap Author and on Twitter at kevinadunlap. We'll catch you on the next episode of Life's Little Lessons.